District Leaders’ Strategies for Funding and Implementing Community Schools

We found that the focal LEAs used different context-specific funding strategies but have all been able to scale up their efforts using a combination of district, state, federal, and community funding sources to cover the costs of CSCs and other CS staff, services, and infrastructure. Implementation of the CS strategy has evolved in these districts over time (ranging from 6 to 20 years, depending on the LEA) and has followed a pattern of initiation, expansion, and institutionalization.[2] While each stage has unique features, there can also be overlap between them as the CS strategy expands from a few schools in an LEA to most schools.

• The initiation stage begins with a few pilot schools and requires one or more champions at the community or district levels to support the strategy in its earliest stages. The CS leaders to whom we spoke identified visionary superintendents and community advocates who worked tirelessly to introduce the CS strategy and philosophy to educators, families, and policymakers.
• The expansion stage is characterized by the success of the CS strategy in the pilot schools and, over time, by the greater availability of public and private funds—through state, federal, foundation, and agency grants—to increase the number of schools implementing the CS strategy.
• The institutionalization stage is marked by the development of district or state policies that officially adopt the CS strategy, the hiring or assigning of district-level personnel to oversee its implementation, and the appropriation of dedicated state and local funds sufficient to cover the costs of CS staff (minimally a CSC/school site specialist) and to scale up CS implementation to all or most schools in the LEA.

In this resource, we first briefly describe CS implementation and funding strategies in each of the four focal LEAs, and then offer five strategies for scaling up funding to community schools, based on CS leaders’ insights about sources, roles, and practices.

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Footnotes

[1] Child Trends conducted 30- to 60-minute interviews with district leaders overseeing the CS strategy from May 10 to June 10, 2022. We analyzed transcripts and notes from their interviews to identify key themes. Each interviewee reviewed the summary of their district for accuracy. Findings have been anonymized to ensure participant confidentiality.

[2] While we use the term community schools to generically refer to the whole child strategy—which includes integrated services, family and community engagement, collaborative leadership, and expanded learning opportunities—the leaders we interviewed used different terms to describe the strategy in their districts.